“I tried to once and the nurse said I’d had a bad dream. Of course, I didn’t know the word kidnapped and I remembered so little by then. I even had a new name and didn’t know the old one. When I’d say—‘two men grabbed me,’ the nurse would say, ‘there, there; no one is going to get you’ and move on to the next child. You see there were so many of us in The Home.
“Once I tried to tell Aunt Marcia. I could tell by her eyes she was scared but she turned it off as if I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“She’s afraid some one would identify you and take you away from her.” Mimi was shrewd.
“I’ve thought of that. It’s awfully nice to know somebody wants me, but I wonder all the time who I really am. Sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear my real mother screaming.”
“You are just you, honey, and that’s good enough for us.” Mimi spoke for all three. “We swear we’ll never breathe a word of your secret.”
How could Mimi ever concentrate on geometry again when she was living in the midst of an unsolved mystery?
CHAPTER X
BETSY SPRINGS A SURPRISE
Mimi and Olivia sat back to back under one of the biggest trees on the campus. Each held an open Spanish Grammar on her drawn-up knees. Each had her nose between the pages.
“I think I know the first five vocabularies now. Ask me, Olivia.”
“Spanish or English?”